God help my poor readers, I've discovered the Snowflake Method X)
Decided to turn this into a full-blown post after it blew up in Fanfiction Writers Unite! What is the Snowflake Method?
Created by Randy Ingermanson in 2002, the Snowflake Method is a way of outlining novels before the large-scale writing begins. Since I've been struggling with a lot of things while working on my longfic (like context blindness), I decided to see if there was some way I could reduce that.
Here's the Cliff Notes version I wrote up, and there's more detail below:
Start with a 15-word sentence explaining your entire story. Like those blurbs they put on the backs of books.
Turn that sentence into a paragraph, with the same goal.
Make one page summaries of your MAIN characters. Name, motivations, goals, ALL of it.
Go back to your summary paragraph. Turn every sentence in that paragraph into its own paragraph.
Make half-page summaries of all your SIDE characters. Done correctly, all of the character pages you've done should briefly tell the story from each character's POV.
Those paragraphs from step 4? Turn that 1-page plot synopsis into FOUR pages now :)
All your character sheets? M O A R D E T A I L. birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the story?
Back to the plot synopsis now--time to make scenes! Randy Ingermanson (the guy who came up with all this) suggests using a spreadsheet to map out all your scenes, what happens in them, whose POV it is, etc. (You could probably pull off something similar in Scrivener. IDK about other writing software.)
OPTIONAL: In your main story doc, expand those scenes from general descriptions into multiple paragraphs. Ingermanson says EVERY scene should have conflict, but for fanfiction I disagree. Nothing wrong with a bit of fluff sometimes :D
(FINAL) Write the thing. All the pieces are in place, just put 'em together!
Under the cut, I have more info on each of these steps, as well as my own analysis of them.
(Full disclosure: some of this is directly copied from Ingermanson's page. This is just for simplicity's sake and nothing more.)
While it’s perfectly valid to write a fic entirely as improv (and often more fun lol), for longfics you’ll want some kind of framework. It’s the same thing as artists transitioning from line art to flat colors to a full-blown painting. The Snowflake Method is the writer’s version of that premise—and only one potential way of many to go about it! Ingermanson calls his method the Snowflake Method because you essentially design the novel in ever-increasing stages; you start small, then build stuff up in ten(-ish) steps, until it looks like a story.
Note that all of this is recommended to be completed over the course of about a month. Each step supposedly should take at least a week, but the original Snowflake Method was also written in 2002—a long, LONG time ago ^_^; Some of the things listed here can now be completed in a much shorter time (or in much easier ways), but the concept itself could still be quite helpful. Without further ado:
Step 1
Come up with a one-sentence summary of your fic. Ingermanson’s example was “A rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul,” the summary for his first novel, Transgression. Where it’s intended to be a simple selling tool to publishers and literary agents, it’s also the foundation of the Snowflake Method. In fanfic context, think of it as your fic’s first impression. What do you want readers to feel before they even click on your story?
Some hints on what makes a good sentence:
Shorter is better. Ingermanson says to try for fewer than 15 words.
In a fanfic context, character names are optional (though Ingermanson says not to put them). This if FAN fiction; readers want to know who you have doing what!
Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose in this story? Now say what he or she wants to win.
Read some one-line blurbs from books you like to learn how to do this. Writing a one-sentence description is a lot harder than it looks, especially when you want to info dump about your fic so bad X)
Step 2
Expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the second stage of the snowflake. Ingermanson suggests a three-act structure (or as he calls it, “three disasters plus an ending”), with each act taking up a quarter of the story. The final quarter should be devoted to the ending and epilogue (if you’re doing one).
It’s not like you have to be precise about it, though—this is still fanfiction. No sane person is gonna be like “Uh akshually yuor secund act wuz 2.034587 words longer than it shuda been!!1!1!!” Please block people who leave comments like that, seriously XD
Step 3
This is the part where you map out storylines for each of your characters. Write a one-page summary sheet that includes:
The character’s name
A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?)
A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline
My personal suggestion: if you have an action-heavy story and want to get even more creative with it, try using DND character sheets for this! They’re still helpful even if your story doesn’t involve magic—just use the first 2 pages of this one and forget the magic section altogether.
IMPORTANT: You may need to go back and revise your one-sentence summary and/or your one-paragraph summary. Go ahead! Tweaking things is an inevitable part of the design process; better to do them during the planning stages now than when you’re 25k words in. (Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha... 🥲) You likely won’t get it right from the outset—and sometimes things will need to change to keep the story manageable, or even as you learn new things during the writing process.
Step 4
By this stage, you should have a good idea of your fic’s overall structure. Getting to this point can take some time, but if the story is broken, you know it now. From here, you keep growing each “node” of your story. Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. The final paragraph should say how the fic ends. At the end of the exercise, you’ll be left with a one-page skeleton of your longfic (or 2, or whatever—it’ll likely be single-digit). The idea is to expand the overall story.
Step 5
Write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters. These “character synopses” should tell the story from the point of view of each character. If needed, go back to the earlier steps and make revisions as needed.
TIP: If you're dealing with a story that has a large ensemble cast, rate each person in that cast on a scale of 1-10 (or a star rating) in terms of importance to your story.
If we're using ATLA as an example, Aang would be a 10 on the 1-10 scale (since he's the MC) and the cabbage guy would be a 1 or 2. And yet, both characters have distinct storylines; Aang is trying to master the 4 elements, and the cabbage guy just wants to sell his cabbages. Just because a character is a 1 or 2 in plot relevance doesn't mean they have to be boring! (This also tells you that not every storyline has to be overly complicated!)
Step 6
By now, you have a solid story and several story threads, one for each character. Next, expand the one-page plot synopsis to a four-page synopsis. Similar to the last step, you’ll be expanding each paragraph from step 4 into a full page. This is to help you figure out the high-level logic of the story and make strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.
Step 7
Expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. The most important thing you want to note is this though: how will this character change by the end of the story? Change can be literally anything from "He masters the 4 elements and becomes the Avatar" to "he finally sells a cabbage". (I must be in an ATLA mood today lol)
This is an expansion of your work in step 3, and it will teach you a lot about your characters. You'll probably go back and revise steps 1-6 as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream. (It may take a full month of solid effort to get here. Longfics are long for the authors too, y'know?)
Step 8
Take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a proper longfic. At this point, Ingermanson suggests using a spreadsheet (like Excel). Keep in mind this method was written in 2002, so yeah.
He says to make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes from your four-page plot outline:
one line for each scene
one column for the POV character
another (wide) column saying what happens
(optional): more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene
Note: If you have something like Scrivener, you can do something similar by making a file for each scene and noting the POV character, what happens, and so on in the Notes window.
If you use the spreadsheet method, you’ll want to make new versions of the story spreadsheet as you progress. Ingermanson suggests determining what scenes go in which chapters after you’re done; I like to do it as I go (since Scrivener lets me drag and drop anyway).
Step 9
Ingermanson says this is optional, but I thought I would include it anyway.
Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here. Ingermanson says that every scene should have conflict, but for fanfiction I disagree. Nothing wrong with a little fluff now and then :D
Step 10
Start the real first draft of the fic! About midway through a first draft (or if you get writer’s block) take a break and fix all the broken parts of your design docs from all the previous steps, if needed. Nothing left after that than to polish—if you want to!
...Phew that was longer than I thought it was, but I'm glad I got it out there! :D If this was any help to anyone, let me know! (And check out Ingermanson's website, too. It's mostly geared toward novelists that want to get published, and he does sell some books and things, but most of the stuff on his site is free! That's how I wrote all this in the first place! :D)
I tested 3 new mapping methods for this coming story.
The Snowflake method, even pared down to accommodate a Short, was not something that would work for this story; however, the first 3 steps were insightful for base story summarising and character development.
These two methods are very vague in actual plot events, but are good for deciding a clear tone based on genre.
Below is my website (desktop only) with sneak peeks of other writing works, art, and playlists.
I’ve been using the snowflake method to plan out my current project, and I am nearly up to step 10 (writing), however I think I need to change step 9, which is to plan each scene.
My adhd brain has lost interest in the project because it’s too planned out (I have an ending. what?). I think the thing to do is go through my scenes spreadsheet and simplify each out to an idea rather than an outline. Keep it directional, no emotions, no details, so i can still discover each scene as I come to it.
Okay, so... y'all familiar with the snowflake method? For those who don't, it's a strategy for constructing your story, and holy crap, it's freaking magic! I used it to outline eight stories of mine! Eight!
I think it works great for me because you're supposed to gradually summarize the premise of your story starting from one sentence and then do it in more detail spanning four pages. It's like once you write down the basic gist of the plot and characters, then you have an easier time expanding on them (at least, that's how it is for me).
I can't say this works for everyone since we're all built different, but if you haven't at least tried it out, do it. Again, it's perfectly fine if you don't like it for one reason or another. I just wanted to share how incredible the snowflake method is because I was always struggling to organize my stories before I gave this an honest shot =)
How to write a novel: Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson teaches his wildly popular Snowflake Method for designing and writing a novel
My writing turned totally around in Jan 2022. I was editing my latest NaNoWriMo project, and decided to check out a resource I found on nanowrimo.org to help me. Basically, I wanted help to write a dynamite blurb, or tagline. When I create a new story, I use a LibreOffice template I created to put my title page, copyright page with a sentence describing what the story's about, TOC, and a dummy first paragraph with my first dummy paragraph heading.
I wanted to know how to write better taglines.
So I read the article above and the light bulb went on! Simple. Elegant. Plotting.
I had always been a pantser. Never planned any part of my stories, and I have about 650 of 'em, half not even to the first draft. Dedicated pantser. In my teen years, I hated English literature in 8th grade even though I knew I needed to know how to plot, but all the analysis of the books we read [and I enjoyed reading them] just made me feel like, 'I'm too stupid to learn all this.'
Now, I'm reading these 10 steps and had an epiphany!
So, I broke down Step 1 and made it into my worksheet for coming up with taglines.
Here's how I think about those 15 max words to get it done:
One Sentence Summary:
Adj.+Noun+Verb+Obj
[Worker] [Action] [Effect] in 15 words or less
Character With Most To Lose:
What They Want:
So, for Adia, Scientist, here's what I came up with:
Discouraged scientist must discover a new fuel so her colony can escape from war.
I write science fiction and I loved chemistry in college, so, hey, I like formulas. I don't want my writing to sound like it came from a formula, but if you look at a lot of genres, there is one.
If you read enough romances, like my sister did, you figure out there's a pattern you can follow as a writer. I was there when she did. She went on to become famous and actually got an award presented to her in New York from her idol, Barbara Cartland at a writer's conference.
I--uh, I'm the non-famous sister who self-publishes on Amazon. But I enjoy my writing life, and though I do love to put romance in my books, romance writing is not my thing.
However, if you're like me and you want to improve your writing, Snowflake Method does work for a lot of us. And, if you buy one of Randy Ingermanson's very entertaining books, you get a free copy of his Snowflake Pro software, which walks you through each step and lets you see what you wrote in the previous step.
I don't do all 10 steps. Let's face it, I'm a plantser now. I'm not that meticuolous and organized. But, I do most of them, because Steps 1-5 give me a nice head start. And, Steps 3, 5 and 7 concentrate on your characters. Characters make your story. If you don't have a character that grabs your reader from the first chapter, why will they want to read your story? You have to have someone to care about and they have to have something happening that attracts the reader.
Now that I had a loose framework for my stories, I needed to [finally] learn something about plot structure more than the beginning, 3 disasters, and an ending. Randy does an excellent job of simplifying 3 act structure [though there are other methods such as PlotDot or Save The Cat that also work with Snowflake Method].
Another resource I found while exploring resources in the Now What? Revision pages on nanowrimo.org was K. M. Weiland's wonderful site:
If there's just one thing that matters to your success as a writer it's story structure. Find out how to use it to write your best story!
This lady puts 3 act structure into terms that I can understand, and she has a vast database of books and movies that she's analyzed for us. If you think 3 act structure is complicated and boring, try reading a little of your favorite on this list:
On this page you can find the complete Story Structure Database index, with book and movie titles listed in alphabetical order.
I love the Marvel movies, so here's how she summarized The Avengers.
Learn the major plot points and story structure of The Avenger's directed by Joss Whedon.
And she even mentions how what works in this movie would not, in a book. This is something I read time and time again about science fiction writing. Science fiction movies are not 'true' science fiction, for the most part. Star Wars is fantasy set on other planets. Star Trek has science in it, but again, is science fantasy.
In science fiction, science drives the story more than characters or plot. Though, to make my science fiction more accessible to a wider audience, I choose to concentrate on psychology, particularly interpersonal relationships. I do make sure that my science is feasible and believable, and explain it simply. And, I do my research.
So, when writing a book, it's good to see analyses like this of movies, but remember, it's different for books.
A friend who was also a producer told me, for a two-hour movie, you have to choose about two chapters for your script. The director has to insert some points to connect the dots. That's why many movies 'aren't like the book' they're based upon. It's an art to take a book and condense it like that so it still makes sense and absorbs the viewer.
But, we writers can learn much from movies about character development and how to get our readers involved with them, and with our stories.
Nico I would like advice on planning. Specifically how to do it. Also on how to write aros/aces/transmascs but that is. another question for another time. (i’ll send other asks later.)
hi!
so, this is kind of vague, because "how to plan a book" is actually a LOT of elements. Characters, plot, themes, dynamics, arcs, etc. but i have some posts and articles that, generally, should help:
there's this one about *my* planning process. warning, it's long as fuck. i'm a huge plotter. Obviously you don't need to copy my exact process, but there's probably some tips in there that could help. (I go over planning character creation, personalities, character dynamics, storylines, backstory, and plot.)
there's also this over-enthusiastic post about 5 different "plotting levels" that i made up, which is shorter and more about specifically planning your plot.
if you're looking for planning methods, i recommend looking at the three-act structure, save the cat (which is similar), and the snowflake method. they're all very popular! funnily enough, i actually despise using all three of them, but they help a lot of people (especially those who aren't as extreme as i am when it comes to planning).
If you have any more questions about planning, just ask! i hope this is a good jumping-off point.
